DUBLIN: Pope Francis touched down in Dublin yesterday for an historic two-day visit to Ireland, where the Catholic Church is battling to regain trust following multiple sexual abuse scandals, reports AFP.

His Alitalia “Shepherd One” flight landed under cloudless skies at 10:26am (0926 GMT), and he emerged from the aircraft around 20 minutes later to a round of applause.

He was met on the red carpet by deputy head of government Simon Coveney and his children, who presented him with a bouquet of white and yellow roses with Irish foliage.

It is the first papal visit to the former bastion of Catholicism since Pope John Paul II spoke to a crowd of 1.5 million people in 1979. Hundreds of thousands of wellwishers and over a 1,000 journalists are expected to follow Francis during his tour of Dublin and County Mayo in the far west of the country as the church struggles against the tide in Ireland.

A new generation has shed traditional mores, electing a gay prime minister and voting to legalise same-sex marriage and abortion—both once unthinkable.

Fintan O’Toole, a columnist for the Irish Times, said the Catholic Church in Ireland was “in some ways beyond repair”.

“He will be greeted with joy by the faithful, but few, even among them, will expect him to be able to fix an institution that has been shaken to its very foundations,” he wrote.

The Vatican was rocked this month by a devastating US report into child sex abuse that accused more than 300 priests in the state of Pennsylvania of abusing more than 1,000 children since the 1950s.

The pope wrote a letter to the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics vowing to prevent future “atrocities” but conceding no efforts “to repair the harm done will ever be sufficient”.

Ireland has grappled with its own history of abuse, with multiple probes finding Catholic Church leaders protected hundreds of predatory priests over decades.